Adding fake animal ears is a way to keep the media within the bounds of reality and avoid potential Squick while still having the appeal of a Bunny or Cat Girl. They are most often found on a headband, but can also appear on hats, hoodies, or other hair decorations and head coverings. They can sometimes be accentuated with fake tails. Most common are cat ears, although fox, bunny, and dog can also be found.

Examples:

Evangeline accepted a bet where she would have to wear cat-ears (plus glasses, a school swimsuit, and the top of a Sailor Fuku) if she lost. Regrettably, Evangeline won this bet, though the readers do get to see Eva with all that stuff on, courtesy of her imagination.

Kaede gets some Bear ears for most of the festival arc (you can still see the tag in front of one of them)

Also, during the festival, several girls wear cat ears as part of a costume or on their own.

During the festival arc, Negi wears at various times a bunny costume, a cat-eared hood, and fox ears (the latter as part of a foxgirl outfit).

In the Magical World Arc, a number of the girls wear cat ears as part of disguise.

Setsuna, Chachamaru and Ako have cat ears as part of their pactio outfits.

"Aki-chan" from Sensitive Pornograph is a rare male, non-cute example. The ears come off as props for his potentially forced bunny play role in his abusive relationship.

Hazuki from Moon Phase. To the extent that in the anime adaptation it seems to be the main point of the entire show. After all, "Neko MimiModo Desu~"

During the first story arc of Dragon Ball, there is a group of bandits that are identified by the bunny ears they wear on top of their hats. This is to show allegiance toward their leader, who's an anthropomorphic rabbit. Of course, confusion ensues when Bulma arrives in town while dressed as a Playboy Bunny because of Oolong.

In early One Piece, the Black Cat Pirates, all of which are males, wear black cat ears, with the exceptions of their captain, Kuro, and first mate, Jango.

In Kanon, child!Yuuichi gives a pair of bunny ears to his Childhood Friend to compensate for her short stature in hide-and-seek. She ran with it.

In Ouran High School Host Club, Ritsu Kasanoda is briefly shown wearing cat ears as part of his attempt to be less scary. It doesn't work.

Naruto and his team mates wear the cat ears version in a filler episode. The ears enable them to understand the cat-people language. The end of the episode has Itachi wearing them as well.

In Sands of Destruction, Kyrie likes wearing cat ears. He eventually convinces Morte to wear rabbit ears, though she's less amused and only doing it out of necessity, as beastmen show more than a little Fantastic Racism towards humans.

Comic Books

The Cat (a.k.a. Greer Grant Nelson), from Marvel's short-lived 1972 series, wears a masked hood with cat ears as part of her costume. She later mutated into the Little Bit Beastly Tigra.

In Super Smash Bros.. Brawl and Melee, equipping said item will increase a character's running speed and drastically increase said character's jumping height. Any character. Most frequently Mewtwo and Ganondorf.

Guild Wars: Cat-eared headgear was handed out as a freebie during Halloween 2010. It's purely ornamental and has no game effect.

Ragnarok Online has various types of animal headbands, like the Kitty Band (which has oddly round ears instead of pointy) and the Bunny Band.

Tales of Vesperia has the Bunny Ears Guild, which gives you bunny headbands for various characters in exchange for acquiring titles. Rita also gets a waitress costume which involves cat ears — presumably on barrettes as they are not attached to a band — and a different headband with a cat face decoration on it.

Trickster Online. Every character has these and a detachable tail by default. Each character type is actually named after which animals ears/tail they have. Odd thing is, they cannot be unequipped until you reach Lv20. Also are non-dropable and have their own equip slots, so they don't hog any real inventory space. Most headgear also let the ears clip through, as if they had holes in them, but capes hide the tail completely.

The game has an achievement for Easter to cast bunny ears on a woman of every playable race above level 18.

It also has the literal version of the trope, a wearable item that gives one bunny ears.

Kokari of Ōkami wears a rabbit pelt over his head. The ears of the pelt are positioned where they would be if he were an anthropomorphic rabbit. It makes him look both cuter and tougher at the same time.

Kasumi in Muv-Luv Unlimited and Muv-Luv Alternative has random bunny ears as part of her uniform. It may have been her own idea to add them, though it also seems like something base commander Yuuko may have done for shits and giggles.

In Ménage à 3, it's become taken as read that animal ears headbands are beyond cute...

Zii was obliged to cosplay as an anime catgirl character while at work in a comics shop. (This may initially not have been entirely to her taste, but she soon discovered that it had the pleasing effect of disabling most of the customers.) Then the cute kitten-ear headband became a prop in her seduction of Sonya and Sonya's boyfriend.

Then Sonya acquired more animal-eared headbands in order to seduce Zii.

A few days after that, Sonya and Yuki were trying competitively to seduce each other. When Sonya found that a striptease wasn't quite working, she just dug out the kitten ears. They seem to have become the sexual nuclear option...

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